How to Film Your Kid's Hockey Drills So the Feedback Is Actually Useful

Most hockey parents already film their kids. Phones come out at every practice, every skills session, every stick-and-puck.

Almost all of that footage is useless for analysis — not because the phone isn't good enough, but because of where it's pointed.

Get three things right and the same phone produces video a coach (or an AI) can actually work with.

The three things that matter

Angle. For shooting mechanics, film from the side, perpendicular to the shooting direction. Almost every mechanical fault — weight transfer, knee bend, hand separation, follow-through — is invisible from the front and obvious from the side. For stickhandling, do the opposite: film from the front, slightly angled, so you can see hands and whether the head is up.

Height. Hold the phone at your player's hip height, not your standing eye level. Filming down at a kid flattens everything and hides knee bend, which is the single most-corrected fault in youth hockey. Kneel if you have to.

Distance. Close enough to see detail, far enough that the whole body plus a stick length of space stays in frame the entire clip. For shooting, that's usually 12-15 feet. For stickhandling, 8-12.

The rules that apply to everything

Fifteen seconds is plenty. One drill, one clip, a handful of reps. Longer footage isn't more useful — it's just more to scroll through.

Landscape, not portrait. Full body in frame beats a tall narrow strip of torso.

Full effort only. Analysis grades what it sees. Half-speed reps produce half-speed mechanics and feedback that doesn't apply to how your kid actually plays.

Watch the light. If your player looks like a silhouette on your screen, that's what any analysis sees too. Avoid filming with a bright window or bright ice directly behind them.

Don't zoom mid-clip. It changes the scale of everything and makes any frame-to-frame comparison meaningless.

The one that matters most: film from the same spot every time

This is the difference between video you can watch and video you can compare.

If you film a wrist shot from the side at hip height in September, and then from behind the net at standing height in January, no coach and no software can tell you what improved. The differences you'd be looking at are camera differences, not player differences.

Mark your spot. Tape on the garage floor, a cone at the rink, a specific seat in the stands. Same place, same height, same angle, every time.

That single habit turns a folder of clips into a record of development.

A quick reference by drill

Wrist shot / snapshot — Side view, hip height, 12-15 feet, full body plus a stick length ahead of the puck. Three to five shots.

Skating stride — Side view for stride length, or front/back for recovery and posture. Pick one and keep it. 20-25 feet back so they stay in frame the whole run.

Crossovers and edges — Stand at the centre of the circle so they move around you at constant distance. Both directions, always.

Stickhandling — Front view, slightly off-centre, chest height, 8-12 feet. Hands, stick blade, and head all in frame.

Passing — Side view of the passer, same setup as a wrist shot. Film the player, not the target.

Why it's worth the effort

A season of consistently filmed clips is a genuine development record. You can put September beside January and see it — a lower stance, a quicker release, a wider stride.

Filmed inconsistently, the same clips show you nothing except that your kid played hockey.

Five seconds of setup per clip is the entire difference.

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